Friday, March 25, 2016

Imagine
a scene with me, if you will. It is the spring of 1976. The United States is in
the grip of bicentennial fever, with all sorts of scheduled events to
commemorate the magic number 200. Everywhere we go, we hear about freedom, a freedom
that so many fought and died for, the honor and pride of living in a free
country.

Somewhere
in this country is a three-year-old boy whose family has been taking him to
church every week. Easter has just arrived, and the boy is present in church
and listening. He may color in a coloring book, or just sit with his blankie
and suck on two fingers. But he has been paying attention.

At
home after church, the mother is working in her office when the little boy
comes in with a question. “Mommy,” he asks, “Does freedom make God die?”

The
mother is shocked. She has no idea what could have planted this question in her
son’s head. But she turns to her son and answers, simply, “Yes.”

Salvador Dali,Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)

Freedom
does make God die. Hey, freedom makes any parent die at least a little bit. To
bestow a measure of freedom on a small, imperfect creature is to invite a whole
world of hurt, not just for the child, but also for the parent. It’s the death
of innocence, the smashing of unfettered possibility. It means potty accidents
and crayoned walls, and sleepovers and science fairs, and a cell phone and a driver’s
license, and experimentation with sex and drugs, and surprising successes and
stunning failures, and convictions that are different from ours, and the
stretching of the rubber band of protectiveness so far that it threatens to
break. It’s just what happens as kids grow up. And woe to the parent who keeps
trying to control the process well into the child’s adulthood. To let go is to
die. But to cling is to kill.

We
have just heard of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. We have recited the anguished
Psalm 22, we have heard the theology of Christ’s priesthood in the letter the
Hebrews, and we have witnessed the entire Passion Narrative. But I want to set
one more story alongside these many: the story of Cain and Abel. After Adam and
Eve choose freedom are cast out from the garden into a much larger world, the
first thing that happens is that Eve bears two sons. And then, one day, the
older brother kills the younger. Why?

I think
Cain kills Abel because life isn’t fair and offers no apology. God favors Abel’s
sacrifice over Cain’s for reasons not even provided in the story. Feelings are
hurt, grudges are nursed, and jealousy and insecurity lead to murder. Cain and
Abel’s story is an etiology: a story that imagines a possible past in order to
teach us why things are they way they are now. It comes right on the heels of
etiologies about the creation of the world, the first human beings, and the choosing
of freedom, which leads us to fall into a state of perceived separation from
God.

The
story of Cain and Abel is the story of all humanity. This week in Brussels, and
then also in Ivory Coast, there were groups of people who felt compelled to
kill, and they did. Perhaps they, too, were upset that life isn’t fair. Not to
mention, this month in Yemen, two drone strikes have killed over 200 people. This
is our world, and though we might want to call these killing actions insane,
nothing about this is insane—it’s merely human. Human beings cause death to try
to make life more fair. Kill the killers. Can’t find the killers? Blame
everybody who looks like them, and then take away their freedom so they can’t
kill, either. Clamp down on their lives so hard that they have no agency to
kill. And when killing somehow happens anyway, clamp down even harder. Send in
the drones. Go for their families, too. Make the sand glow.

Long
ago and far away, there was another man who was killed. Why? Had he killed
somebody? No, but there was reasonable cause to think he might. Why? What did
he say? He said to love your enemies, and to pray for those who persecute you.
And was this reasonable cause for a death sentence? Well, he was threatening
our way of life. And what is that way of life? If you have a problem, you can
always just kill it. You’d better kill it, actually, before it kills you.

Since
so much freedom has led to so much killing, I guess it makes sense to assume
that less freedom might lead to less killing. Our justice system relies on this
assumption. But, funny thing about humans: we are made to be free. It may be
that our very humanity depends on our freedom. And when we can’t be free, either
we lash out and destroy others, or we withdraw into self-destruction.

God
knew this. God gave us a garden of earthly delights, a place designed for its
creatures to enjoy freely. And then God let us decide whether we really wanted
that freedom. God could have clung to us, made us robots, caused us to serve
only God and never ourselves. But instead, God chose to let go. To let go is to
die … but to cling is to kill.

So
God loved without clinging. God waited patiently, and then God invited a
specific group of us into a mutually beneficial contract: Listen to me and
trust me, and love me and one another, and I will be your God, and you will be
my people. This will make you a blessing to all the people of the entire world.
But in our freedom, we kept killing, and persecuting, and oppressing, and being
careless with each other’s lives, and so we broke the contract—multiple times.
So God sent especially insightful people called prophets to show us where we
had gone wrong, to call us back to a life of trust in God and love for one
another. And so often, we killed them, too.

The
law and the prophets showed us how sinful we were, but it turns out that it’s
hard to be in relationship with a Creator you can’t see. And so God became seen
as Jesus, living among us, calling, teaching, healing. And how did we receive
this gift of Jesus, God-among-us? We killed him.

We
keep killing because, ever since Cain, we think it will solve our problems. But
killing has never solved any problem. The best it can do is kick the can down
the road. And so we keep kicking, and killing, and kicking …

But
here’s the thing. How does God respond to all our sin, all this killing? Does
God solve problems by killing them? No. God’s solution to the problem of sin is
simply to forgive it. All of it. Right in the middle of our act of killing him,
Jesus forgives us. He lets it all go, and he dies. Jesus had warned us that
those who try to save their life will lose it. This applied to him as well, as
he shows us so clearly. We exercised our freedom by killing our Creator, and
our freedom made God die. God let go, and we killed God.

When
this happened, the evil forces at work among us were unmasked, and death lost
all its power. God wouldn’t stay dead, and God came back to us not with words
of hate and revenge, but with words of forgiveness and peace. And after all
this, God allows us to retain our complete freedom: freedom to choose to love,
or to choose to kill. Freedom to help, or freedom to ignore. Freedom to care,
or freedom to numb. Ultimate forgiveness, and ultimate freedom.

We
are free creatures, and every day we pay the price. We are perpetrators of
freedom, and we are victims of freedom. But we can also be the beneficiaries of
freedom … when we love and when others love us in return. We are the
beneficiaries of freedom when we somehow find it in us to forgive, and short of
actual forgiveness, at least to say the words of forgiveness so that we can
begin its long, painful process. We are the beneficiaries of freedom when we rediscover
our own dignity, the dignity granted to us in our very creation, the dignity
that is not damaged even by execution on a cross, the dignity that belongs to
each and every creature, that no human can remove, and that even God will never
take away, no matter what horrors we feel free to inflict on others. We treat
our freedom responsibly when we recognize that Christ is present in every other
person who has ever existed, and act accordingly.

You,
here today at St. Paul’s: you are forgiven. You are forgiven for everything.
Jesus took care of that 2000 years ago, and you don’t have to worry about it
ever again, though it is natural to worry and to need to be reminded time and
time again. Your sins are no more. And you, here today at St. Paul’s: God loves
you so much that God has made you free. You can choose your path, and God will
love you no matter what decisions you make, be they great decisions or terrible
decisions. There is no distance from God short of the distance we insist on
maintaining.

Now
then: What are we going to do with all of this forgiveness, and all of this
freedom? There’s too much of it to carry. Where will we put it? Whatever we
choose, we must remember this: Yes, children, freedom does make God die. And
freedom makes us die. To let go is to die. But to cling is to kill. Which we
will choose?

Sunday, March 13, 2016

My
grandfather’s name was Harold Fremont Smith. He was an American Baptist pastor
who moved his family all around the Pacific Northwest—Washington, Oregon,
California, Idaho. He helped establish Cascade Meadows, a Baptist camp out on
U.S. 2, west of Leavenworth.

I
never knew my grandfather. He was killed in a car accident five years before I
was born. My mom has always wished that my dad, my brother and I could have
known him, because to know someone in the flesh is such a gift. You can never
fully express to somebody what it was like to be able to hear, smell, touch a certain
person who is now gone.

Mary
knew Jesus. And before we say more, let’s get straight that this is not Jesus’
mother Mary we’re talking about here, but Mary of Bethany, who may or may not
also have been Mary Magdalene—that’s a topic of considerable scholarly debate.
There are so many Marys in the Gospels, you could certainly be forgiven for
confusing them.

But
Mary of Bethany definitely knew Jesus. This is the Mary who shirked her
housekeeping duties (to the dismay of her sister Martha) in order to listen to
Jesus’ teachings. This is the Mary who grieved with Martha over the death of
their brother Lazarus, and then rejoiced when Jesus frightened death away. It
seems that, spiritually, Mary was a step ahead of the game.

Jesus
and the disciples have come to Bethany because it is their launching pad.
Bethany is a mere two miles from Jerusalem. In the morning, Jesus will ride
into the city on a borrowed donkey, and the events of Holy Week will begin. But
tonight, Mary surprises everyone. She graces Jesus’ feet with spikenard perfume
worth a worker’s wages for a year—a year!
And then she scandalously caresses Jesus with her hair and, I imagine, with
free-flowing tears.

Mary
understands that in the days to come, Jesus is going to give himself away until
there’s nothing left. And until he does, Mary intends to stay as close to him
as she can. She’s going to anoint his body for burial while he’s still alive,
so she can inhale the fragrance that will always remind her of her Lord. Mary
knows that Jesus’ days are numbered, and she’s already grieving. Why is this so
hard for Judas to understand?

Oh,
but I’ve been Judas. I totally get where he’s coming from. When’s the last time
you dropped a year’s wages on a bottle of wine, no matter how important the
occasion? And if you had, don’t you think some conscientious Christian would
have objected on principle to a $20,000 Chateau Lafite?

Now,
at this point I want to confess something to you: I don’t actually believe the
gospel writer’s aside about Judas being a thief. He may have been stingy, and
he may have totally misunderstood Jesus’ mission and purpose. But Judas was so
passionate about law and order that he turned Jesus in for incitement, and his
conscience wouldn’t even let him keep the blood money. And then he hanged
himself over it! No, Judas was a slave to God’s law—he was no thief. It’s a
shame that the writer of John’s Gospel felt the need to slander Judas, as if his
name weren’t already reviled worldwide. Feel free to side with the Bible over me,
though—that’s OK.

So
anyway … Mary knew she had one last chance to show Jesus how much she loved
him. Have you ever given an extravagant gift, far more extravagant than the
situation called for? Whether you’ve had the means to donate a lot of money to
a good cause, or you’ve just splurged on a present for your spouse without an
occasion, it’s kind of fun, isn’t it? Because deep down, the one receiving the
gift knows it’s not about the money. It’s just that you couldn’t pass up the
perfect gift.

In
Mary’s case, the gift is so perfect it’s prophetic. What’s a year’s wages
compared to Jesus? Can you answer that for yourself? Mary knows Jesus well
enough to understand that he is worth more than anything money can buy.

Judas,
on the other hand, has the mindset we might have when doing last-minute Christmas
shopping: Well, she’s only my cousin. Is $25 too much to spend? Twenty? What
about a gift for my brother’s girlfriend? Fifteen? If they get engaged first,
should I up it to thirty? So I’d like to ask Judas: How much nard would
have been an appropriate amount for Jesus? Maybe an eighth of that? Or a
month’s wages? Is Jesus worth more than a diamond engagement ring? Where would
you draw the line, Judas?

See,
Judas is the fun police. He’s well-intentioned, but he’s insufferable. I’ve
known people like him, and I’ve got enough bleeding-heart tendencies to slip
into that attitude myself occasionally: somewhere in the world right now,
someone is suffering. And as long as that’s true, none of us is allowed to have
any fun!

But
it’s no use, don’t you see? There will be many other opportunities to help the
poor. Tonight, Jesus is moving inexorably from life toward death, and Mary knows
it. Judas knows it, too. Judas is already wondering, “What if he’s not the
Messiah after all? Mary may have thrown away a year’s wages, but I’ve thrown
away three years of hard work and passionate hope, and I don’t think Jesus is committed
to the cause. He’s not proving himself to be the kind of leader who could
successfully carry off a coup against the Romans! In fact, I’m starting to
think it’s time to cut my losses. Yes, the only way for me to stay in control
of this situation is … to turn Jesus in.” Or maybe Judas is thinking, “All I need
to do is set up the right conditions. If I arrange an arrest, Jesus will resist,
and the coup will begin! That’s how I can control this situation.” Indeed,
maybe that’s at the heart of Judas’s problem: he thinks he can actually be in
control of any situation at all.

Mary
has a different perspective. She may not know how any good could possibly come
from Jesus’ death, but as a woman, she rarely expects to be in control. So she
is relinquishing it. Mary knows the words we heard this morning from the
Prophet Isaiah:

I am about to do a new thing;

Now it springs
forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

And rivers in the
desert.

And today’s psalm—maybe that was on her lips too as she worked to
ease the fire in Jesus’ head and feet:

Those who sowed with tears

will reap with songs
of joy.

Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed,

will come again with
joy, shouldering their sheaves.

Mary will go out weeping, carrying the seed of faith that is to be
buried in the ground, dead to the world. She doesn’t know how God’s grace will
work—just that it will work. It has
to work, because it comes from God. As Paul would write decades later:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the
sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may
attain the resurrection from the dead.

Paul
wrote from the other side of the Resurrection, with a bittersweet longing that
he never knew the man Jesus. But Mary did. She heard him and smelled him and
clung to his body desperately, knowing that very soon he would be snatched
away.

All
life eventually leads to death. We know this. We live this reality every day.
But as Christians, we also understand the flip side of that coin: All death
leads to life. That’s the Good News!

Thirty-six
years ago this month, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in San Salvador
right in the middle of celebrating the Mass. Just two weeks before he was
killed, Romero told a reporter: “I must tell you, as a Christian, I do not
believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall arise in the
Salvadoran people.”

Several
days before his murder, Romero said, “You can tell the people that if they
succeed in killing me … I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they
will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of
God, which is the people, will never perish."

And
just moments before his death, in his homily, Archbishop Romero said, “Those
who surrender to the service of the poor through the love of Christ will live
like the grain of wheat that dies. . . The harvest comes because of the grain
that dies … We know that every effort to improve society, above all when
society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses, that
God wants, that God demands of us.” And then he was shot. I have visited that
church; I have stood in the very spot where Oscar Romero died.

I
wish I had known Archbishop Romero. He understood that justice runs much deeper
than politics and much deeper than not spending money on extravagant things. Justice
means standing in solidarity with the powerless, something that Jesus specifically
instructed us to do time and time again. There is no scarcity in this world
short of the scarcity we inflict. God has given us everything we need. Why would
we keep it from each other?

I also
wish I had known my grandfather—the pastor, the father, the husband that my
relatives knew.

As for
Jesus … well, in this place, we try to know Jesus a little better every week.
Maybe it’s not as easy for us as it was for Mary. Maybe it doesn’t feel as
real. But there’s a part of me that understands that Jesus is actually more real now than he was in those
thirty years in Palestine. If Jesus doesn’t feel all that real to you, at least
rest assured that the journey toward him is ongoing, and that you are real to
Jesus. Paul wrote, “I press on to make [the knowledge of Christ] my own,
because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

Mary
knew Jesus, and thanks be to God, we can know Jesus, too. In this final week
before Holy Week, let’s remember the value of knowing people in the flesh, but
let’s also remember that faith means trusting that every death leads to new
life. And now let’s speak that faith together.